Incorporating Entrustable Professional Activities in Athletic Training Education

Document Type

Poster

Abstract

An unprecedented shift in medical education occurred at the beginning of the century with a widespread move to competency-based education. This shift from traditional time-based teaching methods to an outcomes-based approach has revolutionized medical education. It all started with the adoption of the six core competencies and the development of outcome measures used to provide a systematic framework for curriculum development and assessment. The outcome measures adopted by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), milestones, serve as an observable marker for an individual’s ability along a developmental continuum. The challenges that have emerged have centered around how to best utilize the milestones to progress learners in the clinical setting. The solution is the creation of entrustable professional activities (EPAs). The EPAs are activities that experts have deemed necessary for a person working in that profession to be able to competently carry out unsupervised. Athletic training education has adopted the core competencies and athletic training specific milestones have been created. The next logical step for athletic training education is to create athletic training-specific EPAs. The EPAs will provide a roadmap for the learner, the preceptor, and the faculty. Students are often too nervous when they first start a clinical experience to tell the preceptor what they feel like they have mastered and what they really need to work on. Preceptors are left to try to figure out exactly what the student can be trusted to do with limited supervision and what the student should only observe, this process can take several weeks. The EPAs will eliminate the unknowns and give both the student and the preceptor a clear picture of where that student is from day one. Both student and preceptor can be looking for clinical opportunities to address their deficiencies and allow them to demonstrate what they have been entrusted to do. Another huge advantage of adopting EPAs is that each student will feel confident in what they can do because their professors and preceptors trust them to do those activities. Students will be more apt to ask for help when they need it and to try to come up with the solution on their own when they are able. After they have been entrusted to do all the EPAs, students should be ready to transition to practice. Once adopted, the EPAs will allow faculty to transition their traditional time-based education into a competency-based approach without as many challenges as medical education has had to work through. Traditionally in health care education, students progress through a series of courses on a prescribed timetable then participate in clinical assignments along a similar continuum. Once the student takes all the coursework and finishes their clinical education, that student graduates take a standardized test and once passed is awarded certification or credentials, which essentially state that this graduate is now ready to practice independently and perform all the essential tasks of that profession. The problem with this approach is that it does not consider the individual learner’s ability to work as a professional.

Publication Date

Spring 2021

Comments

Poster presented at ATSU-ASHS DAT Spring - 2021. This is a Kubify based presentation hosted at https://api.ltb.io/show/BNYKB It includes a video presentation, references, a PowerPoint presentation, and summary poster.

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